www.IRC-Junkie.org – IRC News

Christopher Maxwell, 21, of Vacaville, California, has been sentenced to jail for three years. IRC-Junkie reported about him being charged in february of this year.

Aside of the hospital other networks that were affected included the department of defense and a California school district.

He would rent out his network to perform DDoS attacks, and the infected machines earned him money with showing advertisements.

The judge showed little sympathy for Maxwell, calling him “incredible self-centered” with little regard for the impact of his actions on others. She also wanted Maxwell to be set as “deterrence for all those youth out there who are squirreled away in their basements hacking”.

Machines connected to the Internet and not having installed patch MS06-040 released by Microsoft last week are now vulnerable for being hijacked by a new worm, a variant of the Mocbot trojan. This first appeared in August 2005 as the Zotob-worm.

Security firms expect this worm-attack to grow like a big one, despite this worm seemingly only to attack Windows 2000 machines.

Once installed into the system, the bot will connect to an IRC server and wait there for commands from the dronemaster. The hosts in question are bbjj.househot.com:18067 and ypgw.wallloan.com:18067.

A 63-year-old from England and a 28-year-old man in Scotland, and a 19-year-old man in Finland (all said to be member of the M00P online group) have been arrested and charged of “an international conspiracy to infect computers using viruses attached to unsolicited commercial e-mail,” a spokesman of the English police said.

The groups’ activities were mainly directed at businesses in the U.K. of which computers were being infected with one of three virusses: Stinx, Breplibot or Rykanos. Once infected, the virus would try and hide itself using features from Sony BMG digital rights management or other DRM software.

Jeanson James Ancheta, 20, of Downey, California, of which we reported about his arrest here, and him pleading guilty here, has heard his sentence from United States District Judge R. Gary Klausner in Los Angeles.

Judge Klausner, who characterized Ancheta’s crimes as “extensive, serious and sophisticated,” has sentenced him to 57 months in jail. After he completes his jail time, he will serve three years of supervised release. In this time his access to computers and the Internet will be limited. He will also have to pay 15000$ USD damages to the Weapons Division of the United States Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake and the Defense Information Systems Agency, and all his profits from the activities including a BMW have been forfeited.

Rootkits for Windows are the ‘hot’ thing among certain groups of people who like to keep their practices hidden on the computers of unknowing others.

Rootkits work in such ways that they can hide their processes from the user, making it hard to detect the rootkit, let alone remove it from the system. Although a rootkit in itself can be hidden form the user, often a rootkit is not enough to perform the tasks the malicious user wants accomplished. Providing a FTP server, connecting to IRC to receive commands and sort like features are still provided by separate software which can be detected and show a possible rootkit installed.